


The Smell of Smoke

by counthoelaf



Category: Carmilla (Web Series)
Genre: 60 years later, Angst, F/F, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-17
Updated: 2015-04-17
Packaged: 2018-03-23 10:42:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,728
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3765145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/counthoelaf/pseuds/counthoelaf
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carmilla finds Laura 60 years later</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Smell of Smoke

I smelled the smoke rising from her yard before I saw it. It smelled like paper and roses, like it always did, so I pulled my hood over my head and I slipped out the door, like I always did.

* * * * *

The air in my backyard was crisp. It was my second autumn in this house, a new record for me. I looked at the rotten apples on the ground. I could hear her moving around in her backyard, coughing and following every hack with an “oh god” or “why?” I would have thought she’d come up with something new to say but then, Laura’s nothing if not consistent.

That’s the only reason I had stayed here. I smelled her when I first moved in, of course. When I pulled up to the townhouse I had smelled her in the air, so so faintly but absolutely the same. I took the townhouse on the spot. It had taken me a few days to track down where it was coming from, but eventually I had realized we shared a fence. I leaned against it, smelling her everywhere. With my eyes closed I could feel her hands back on my skin again, warm and soft and forgiving of 60 years.

She didn’t know we shared a fence. I was careful. I kept my blinds closed and I stayed indoors during the day, and when I went out I wore my hood low across my face. I made it into the backyard more than anywhere else. It’s so ironic, since she was always so excited to share with me. She loved sharing desserts. She loved sharing clothes. She loved our four years sharing the apartment and then our year sharing rings, counting down days. She wanted to share everything, she told me. Everything. So I left.

Her routine started the same way as always. The smoke twisted and turned and if I looked straight up I could see it rising into the air like a beacon. Her words reached me and I tuned out the rest of the world to hear her frail, wobbly voice.

“Dear Laura,  
I found a new place. It’s small, cramped, dark. You’d hate it. I was standing in the office signing the papers and the landlord, the fuckwad, was asking me if I had a boyfriend. It took everything in me not to drag him into the apartment as my christening meal.  
Just kidding. Sorry. I’m perfectly happy here. And I hope you’re happy too. I promise this is the last letter.  
Carm.”

I heard the paper crumple and I inhaled deeply as she threw it on the fire and the smoke changed ever so slightly. I smiled at her ritual. Laura is nothing if not consistent. I stayed there, leaned against the fence with a smile on my face. The smoke changed a few more times, and I knew she was throwing other things on the pile. I would stay here until the fire burned out, until she was long since indoors. It was my routine, like she had hers.

“Dear Laura,”

I sat up straighter. She never read more than one in a day. She had been working backwards since six months ago, one letter a day. I knew she was close now. I recognized the last one as one of the first, but I didn’t expect to hear her again today. She spoke louder now. Despite the wavering of 80 years of use, her voice was meant to carry. I listened.

“Never mind. I’ve thought about it and I’m not coming back. I’m really not. You know why. I’m sorry I ruined everything. I’m sorry I ruined the wedding, and the honeymoon, and the whole--everything you had planned for us to share over the next I don’t know how many years. But you have to promise you’ll move on, okay? Go have a regular life, a normal life. Keep your friends and your family and live, okay? Find someone else to love. I’m not coming back. I promise this is the last letter.”

I shivered. I didn’t remember that one. I tried not to think about her face, I tried not to imagine that wrinkled face from across the fence young again, reading those words for the first time.

“Love, Carm.”

Love? I didn’t remember writing that. I shouldn’t have written that. I heard the crumple, tipped my head back against the fence and saw the smoke turn paler. Then the air filled with a heavy smell, one that sank down around me and chained me to the ground. The flowers. They were the flowers. The ones I had paid for a month in advance, the ones the delivery boys couldn’t possibly get out in that weather, the ones Laura had sent me to pick up on foot, in the rain, because what’s a wedding without flowers? They had smelled then too, soaked with rain and waiting for their big day. Laura’s kiss when I brought them through the door, her delighted peck on the cheek while she held the door open and her longer, happier kiss against my lips after I set down the hundreds of roses, was the last time I felt her lips smiling as they touched my skin. I could still feel it, if I concentrated. If I forgot 60 years.

My fence squeaked, and I looked down its length to the wooden gate at the end, rusted shut and overgrown with weeds. It wobbled, shook, then with a mighty slamming of the hinges it opened a few inches then stopped, stuck in the yellow weeds. My breath came too hard and I felt dizzy. Her smell was overpowering. I looked at the door to my house, wondering for a wild moment if I could make it indoors before she got through. But the gate opened, and the hobbled figure of an 80-year-old squeezed past and into my backyard.

I couldn’t help staring. Her house slippers had mud on them, both from today and from all the other days she had stood beside her firepit. The afternoon was chilly, not cold, but she was wrapped in a heavy blanket over her jacket. A scarf covered her head, a knit cap on top of that. She was still facing the gate. I stared and stared, my eyes soaking up every bit of her they could before I knew I would have to hide my face. She started turning towards me, and I ducked further under my hood, facing away from her. She walked towards me slowly, the footsteps of an old woman. I tried not to notice. With a groan, she sat beside me in the grass.

“I smelled you.”

I didn’t say anything. She let me stare at the house while she continued speaking.

“It was about a year ago, I think. I was out that day, and when I got home I realized there was a scent somewhere. I didn’t recognize it.”

My heart pounded furiously.

“It was stronger against the fence, so I sat there in the mornings, breathing through my nose and trying to remember. And then one day, I heard you laugh, just once. You were inside your house. It was so so faint. But I heard it, and I remembered everything. The smell, it was...it was all over me. All over everything. I had sat against this fence, trying to remember, for months. It was like when you left. Your smell wouldn’t leave me. And I could remember...do you know what I remembered?”

“What?” I asked, and she inhaled at my voice, unchanged through the years.

“I...I remembered the feel of you. Your skin. How you felt against me, with me, how you looked when I--”

“Please,” I said, and my voice cracked. “Please don’t.”

She was still looking at me, I knew she was. Her hand reached out, so so slowly, and landed on my knee. I looked at it, knuckles swollen and skin spotted with age. I put mine on top, and it still felt like her hand underneath. And now I knew she was looking at my hand, the same as the last time it touched her. She leaned forward to look in my face. I turned away. Her hand slid out from under mine.

“Look at me,” she said harshly. I shook my head. “I know what your face will look like, so don’t try to hide. Look at me.”

“No.” I felt the wind cooling the tracks my tears left across my cheeks.

“Look at me, Carmilla.” Her voice cramped around my name, like a word she hadn’t said in decades. I turned my head to her, and her hands shook as they reached up to my hood. I willed my neck to be steel, to not lean into the warmth of her hands, so near my face as she pulled back the hood. Her jaw hardened when she saw my face, and her eyes grew darker.

“I’m dying, thanks to you.”

“I’m sorry,” I whispered. She held my gaze.

“I knew there had to be others, and I wasn’t ready to give up. I started looking after you left, using your browser history, looking through your email. I knew I’d find the others, and I thought I could get them to do it.”

“Laura,” I breathed.

“Your friends wouldn’t do it. They laughed at me, said they’d hunt me down and leave me. So I started looking other places. I found them, here and there, living in abandoned houses or incredible mansions. There didn’t seem to be an in-between. Is that a vampire thing? Always one or the other?”

I couldn’t answer her, so she continued talking. “Eventually I found one. An addict. He’d used heroin to stop himself from feeding. I paid him. I paid him a lot. It hurt when he turned me. It hurt like hell, not like when you used to...when we would…”

She couldn’t say it. She was always so modest. I could say it, but I didn’t. Instead I remembered, I thought back to the 20 year old Laura I knew, panting, moaning, begging me to bite her again. I remembered dragging my tongue across her inner thigh, tasting all the flavors of my Laura. I remembered sucking ever so gently as she moaned, my fingers deep inside her and my brain roaring to take more. I remembered her nails digging through my hair, my scalp, then my shoulders as I moved up to kiss her, then my back as our lips met. I remembered her digging deep, trying to draw blood. I remember her begging me to let her.

“I didn’t know if it had worked or not until a couple months later. I had gone to see a doctor since my cough hadn’t gone away, and he diagnosed it. HIV. I’d be dead in two years. But it turns out I did manage to steal a little of his immortality. I’ve been dying ever since.”

“Oh god,” I whispered, “Laura.”

Her hand found my knee again, and I looked down at it. I noticed her other hand held a crumpled piece of paper. She handed it to me. I glanced and saw my handwriting scratching across the hotel stationary, more than half a century old now. It was the first.

“You could have saved me from all this,” she said. Her face remained empty, or maybe I just didn’t know how to read between the new lines, but the words shook with fury. “Read it,” she said, her weathered hand sliding across my thigh. I shook my head, but the look in her eye pulled another drop from mine and I quickly looked down at the letter. She was still my Laura in that old body she’d been so scared of.

“Dear Laura,  
I’m sorry. Holy god in heaven I am so sorry. I won’t do it to you though. So much can go wrong, and you’ll be different after. It’s not just eternal life, it’s not easy like you think. You deserve better. Laura, you’re perfect. You’re amazing. You are everything beautiful, and I will not be the one to change that. I wish this was different. I wish I could come back to you. Maybe someday you’ll let me near you again, but just know that I’m always yours. And my always lasts a long time. Please Laura, have a better life. Please. I love you. I really do. I promise this is the only letter.  
Love, Carm.”

When I looked up from the letter the backyard was misty. Her hand rode high on my thigh and she put her other hand against my cheek, pulling me to look at her.

“You did this to me,” she said, her face full of accusation and absent the love she had once shown me. I hoped my face showed something else. I put my hand on her cheek and she gasped, her eyes closing. Her skin wasn’t soft under my hand anymore. It was still warm, but now the hard lines and deep grooves spoke of rage. I couldn’t help it. I kissed her.

She tasted of sickness and death. It was so much a part of her that I imagined she must have tasted like that since that goddamn vampire had gotten his teeth in her. She kissed me back, and I felt the rhythm emerge just like it had when she was young. Our lips pressed together, our hands on each others’ faces, and I swung one leg over her and landed on her lap, her back still against the fence.

She winced as my weight settled on her arthritic legs so I lifted up onto my knees, one hand still caressing her face and the other pushing against the fence, the letter balled up in my fist. She slid her hands up my legs and kissed me harder and I knew the water between our faces was from my eyes, not hers. Her hand found mine and pulled it violently away from her face. I leaned back, looking at her. I didn’t take her anger seriously when she was 20, but after years of fury her lines were in all the right places, and I was terrified. She pulled my hand roughly into her pants and I didn’t argue. I couldn’t help it. I fucked her.

I felt her head fall back and thump against the fence and I leaned down to kiss her again. She kept one hand on my wrist, pushing me harder, and the other she wrapped around my neck. I kissed her and kissed her and wished I couldn’t feel the chapped lips where there had been soft ones before. She whimpered, and it sounded different than anything she had cried into my mouth before. I pulled back to watch her face, to see if it was the same face.

“Bite me,” she panted. “Bite me, Carm, do it.” Her pale face didn’t have the flush it used to. Her eyes didn’t squeeze shut as tightly as they used to and her jaw clenched instead of falling open. This wasn’t my Laura anymore.

“No,” I said. And she came, not saying my name and not meeting my eye. I started pulling my fingers from her but the hand around my wrist clenched tighter and she pushed me back in, harder and faster this time.

“Bite me, Carm,” she said. And I shook my head, and she glared at me, and a drop of water that had made its way to my chin fell onto her cheek. “Bite me,” she said again. I couldn’t help it. I bit her.

Her blood was stale. It moved slowly down my throat. I tried not to recoil as I heard her choking through coming again. I drank. I did not stop.

Her feet left two deep tracks in the mud when I dragged her back to her yard. I laid her next to the fire pit, still smoking enthusiastically, unaware the only person it needed to impress was gone. An empty box lay nearby, all the mementos burned. My fingers spasmed from clenching so tightly and I relaxed them, the letter coming loose in my fist. I dropped it into the fire.

* * * * *

I left town that night. The neighborhood still smelled of her.

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies for any typos, mistakes, etc. Also, sorry for the angst. Like really, sorry. Leave a comment?
> 
> I'm on tumblr as counthoelaf. Talk to me there!


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